#632: PASOLINI, Pier Paolo: The Decameron (1971)

TRILOGY OF LIFE {Spine #631}

PASOLINI, Pier Paolo (Italy)

The Decameron [1971]

Spine #632
Blu-ray

Pier Paolo Pasolini weaves together a handful of Giovanni Boccaccio's fourteenth-century moral tales in this picturesque free-for-all. The Decmeron explores the delectations and dark corners of an earlier and, as the filmmaker saw it, less compromised time. Among the chief delights are a young man's exploits with a gang of grave robbers, a flock of randy nuns who sin with a strapping gardener, and Pasolini's appearance as a pupil of the painter Giotto, at work on a massive fresco. One of the director's most popular films, The Decameron, transposed to Naples from Boccaccio's Florence, is a cutting takedown of the pieties surrounding religion and sex.

111 minutes
Color

Monaural

in Italian

1:85:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2012

Director/Writers

Pier Paolo Pasolini was 49 when he wrote and directed The Decameron.

Based on the stories of Giovanni Boccaccio.

Other Pasolini films in the Collection:

#0000F1: Accattone (1961)
#0000F2/#236: Mamma Roma (1962)
#0000F3: Love Meetings (1964)
#0000F4: The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)
#0000F5: The Hawks and the Sparrows (1966)
#0000F6: Oedipus Rex (1967)
#0000F7/#1013: Teorema (1968)
#0000F8: Porcile (1969)
#0000F9: Medea (1969)
#633: The Canterbury Tales (1972)
#634: Arabian Nights (1974)
#17: Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1976)

The Film

Boccaccio.

The opening film of the trilogy sets the tone ... a raunchy visual feast of Boccaccio's famous text!

The episodes:

• A short scene of Ciappelletto (Franco Citti) killing someone, then disposing of the body.
• Andreuccio (Ninetto Davoli) has come to Naples to buy horses. A rich lady cons him of his money (a trough of excrement is involved). He is subsequently persuaded to participate in a robbery of a tomb, with a predictable comic denouement.
• Ciappelletto returns as a bystander who listens to an old man telling a tale featuring a bunch of horny nuns.
• Masetto (Vincenzo Amato) — a gardener in a convent — pretends to be a deaf-mute. The nuns feel safe in having sex with him, believing he couldn't talk. By the time he gets around to the abbess, he is naturally exhausted and tells her so. She declares his "sudden" ability to speak a miracle.
• Peronella (Angela Luce)'s husband (Vincenzo Ferrigno) comes home unexpectedly while she is having sex with her lover. A large pot figures in the ensuing comedic tale.
• The continuation and finale of the Ciappelletto story. His untruthful confession to a priest results in his being mourned as a saint.
• Giotto's pupil, played by Pasolini, preparing to paint a fresco in the Basilica of Santa Chiara.
• Caterina (Elisabetta Genovese) and Ricciardo (Francesco Gavazzi) plan a secret rendez-vous to have sex. Her parents discover them in the morning and they are obliged to get married.
• Elizabeth (unidentified actress) is in love with Lorenzo (Giuseppe Arrigio). Her three domineering brothers don't approve, and Lorenzo is murdered. Elizabeth and her maid dig him up, cut off his head, and plant it underneath a basil plant.
• Pietro (Giovanni Davoli) and Don Gianni (Vittorio Vittori — what a face!) are headed to Pietro's home, where his wife, Gemmata (Mirella Catanesi) awaits. Forced to sleep in the barn, Don Gianni concocts a farce which enables him to have sex with Gemmata right in front of her husband.
• Meuccio and Tingoccio (both unidentified actors) debate whether their sins will weigh against them in the afterlife. Tingoccio appears to Meuccio after his death to inform him that sex is not a mortal sin. Meuccio runs to his lover.
• Giotto's pupil completes his fresco, and ponders:
• "Why create a work of art when dreaming about it is so much sweeter?"

The Extras

The Booklet

Sixty-eight page booklet featuring an essay by Colin MacCabe, and an article entitled Decamerotic.

MacCabe:

"Pasolini's first source text [for the trilogy] was The Decameron, in which ten young aristocrats flee plague-ridden Florence for the countryside. To pass the time, they tell ten stories each day for ten days — a hundred stories in all. The book, written in the 1350s, in the then still despised vulgar tongue of Italian rather than the culturally approved Latin, is one of the founding texts of modern Europe. Pasolini makes very short shrift of it. First, he completely abandons the framing device, placing us instead in a fluid world in which one story runs into another, sometimes interrupted by set pieces, sometimes continuously. The film nevertheless divides formally into two. We start with the opening tale of The Decameron, the account of a wicked man, Ciappelletto, who on his deathbed convinces a priest that he is a saint. This story is not, as in the Boccaccio, a discrete unit but has woven into it other stories from the book, two of which are exceptionally explicit: that of Masetto and the nuns, wherein a man pretends to be a deaf-mute in order to gain entrance to a convent, and the story of Peronella, who persuades her husband to get into a huge jar so that she can continue the lovemaking that his early return home has interrupted."

Decamerotic:

"The success of Pasolini's The Decameron, with its lighthearted yet explicit sexuality, led to an unforeseen development in Italian cinema: a subgenre of soft-core pornographic films that have been unofficially called 'Decamerotic.' ... at least twenty films of this subgenre were made between 1971 and 1973 ... some of the notable titles include The Black Decameron (1972, Piero Vivarelli), Canterbury proibito (1972, Italo Alfaro), Decameron no. 2: Le altre novelle del Boccaccio (1972, Mino Guerrini), Decameron no. 4: le belle novelle del Boccaccio (1972, Paolo Bianchini), Decameroticus (1972, Giuliano Biagetti), The Last Decameron: Adultery in 7 Easy Lessons (1972, Italo Alfaro), 1001 Nights of Pleasure (1972, Antonio Margheriti), The Lusty Wives of Canterbury (1973, Lucio Dandolo), and Tales of Canterbury (1973, John W. Shadow)."

Commentary

None.

On The Decameron

A visual essay by film scholar Patrick Rumble.

The Lost Body of Alibech (2005)

A forty-five minute documentary by Roberto Chiesi about a lost sequence from The Decameron.

Via Pasolini (2005)

A twenty-seven-minute documentary featuring archival footage of director Pasolini discussing his views on language, film, and modern society.

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